Til ke Thal - Sesame Chikki

Til takti - Sesame Saucer

If you want to cook like an expert you need not make your recipe unnecessarily complicated for any dish. Any recipe justfollowing the basics intelligently can yield the best results every time. In Bengali there is a proverb 'তিল কে তাল করা' [til ke taal kora] meaning to blow up a tiny sesame seed into a large palmyra fruit or to blow things out of proportion, to grossly exaggerate like 'making an elephant out of the mosquito'. One can see here how Til [sesame] became a Thal [dish or Saucer] This is a sesame seed candy comparable with Pasteli of Greece, one of the most common traditional Bengali confection, which every Bengali wherever he or she hails from must have tried in the lifetime due to natural attraction.

Ingredients:

White sesame:
3/4 cup

Sugar cane jaggery:
1 cup

Ghee or clarified butter:
3 tsp

Directions:

Semi liquid jaggery should be boiled on moderate heat till the point it boils over and becomes thick. Next it has to be stirred with a large round ladle so that air gets trapped inside and it gets swollen so that it assumes a frothy texture. On achieving this it should be poured on a previously greased plate with ghee and hot dry roasted crispy sesame seeds should be scattered on it promptly. Let it cool down for sometime then it will form a solid disc of sesame jaggery we call til takti - sesame saucer.